Great smiles are a huge asset in life, but how about a beautiful face. We recognize beauty when we see it, and it is not usually one thing that makes the face beautiful but all of it. Davinci learned about this phenomena and called it the Golden proportion. It is the proportion that makes us look at a picture of Cindy Crawford or George Clooney and agree that they are attractive. There is a universal recognition of good proportion running throughout the beauty of nature and art. We recongnise good proportion in the same way as we know how to divide a line in half or erect a perpendicular. We easily agree that a face looks too long, or too short.

For long now we were only obsessed with how a smile looks, we were making sure that it is streight and symmetric. We were making everyone have the "Roman Profile" no matter what race they were from. We recommended jaw surgery, teeth extractions, and headgears, because we were thought that the most harmonious face is the flat Roman Face. The result is we ended up with kids having long faces, short faces, or a sunken in face (mid-face deficient), TMJ Disorder, and kids having Obstructive sleep apnea and being diagnoses with ADD.

Today the well educated doctors are doing things a bit different. We have set a protocal to follow, we are responsible not to only give these kids a beautiful smile, but functionaly healthy joint, airway and proportional faces as well.

Therefore the nine keys to facial harmony we follow in our practice are:

Fully Developed Upper Jaw

Unobstructed Nasal Breathing

Proper Forward Positioning of Lower Jaw

Healthy TMJ Function

Ideal Head Posture

Avoidance of Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Ideal Lower Facial Symmetry

Elimination of Adverse Oral Habits

Optimal Teeth Positioning

In my next blogs I will go over each one of these keys in more detail.